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Scientific and Technical Information Why Which Were & How

Over the years the Panel has discussed storage and retrieval of information and in 1968, together with the
Avionics Panel of AGARD, it organized and presented a symposium entitled “Information Storage and Retrieval:
A User Supplier Dialogue”.

This symposium was held principally for the benefit of scientists, engineers and management personnel who use
information services, inviting them to comment on the present state-of-the—art, on the basic design of future systems
and to point out their needs. The dialogue, however, was only partly successful in the sense that “user needs" were
not comprehensively defined.

As a result of this it became clear that in the future the Panel’s attention should be more actively directed at
the user. In this context the presentation of a series of lectures to familiarize the user with the various aspects of
the information environment seemed an appropriate means to pursue the dialogue. This appeared all the more
desirable because evidence collected by means of so—called “user studies” tends to confirm the information organizer’s
point of view that the user hardly exists. .

It is rather distressing to find that our information systems which have been developed with great effort and at
tremendous costs to a high degree of sophistication seem to be missing their goal. Unquestionably a wealth of
information is stored in today’s mechanical systems but somehow the system operator does not fully succeed in
retrieving that which the user wants. After a number of failures the latter gets more or less disgusted and stays away.
Does this imply that information systems from a cost-benefit point of view are hardly, if at all, justified? In answer
one might ask what the cost would have been without them.

It must be agreed that system operators have mostly directed their efforts at coping with the vastly increasing
amount of published knowledge thereby neglecting to a considerable extent the user and what he needs. The
increasing speed and memory capacity of the computer made it possible to register this published material and make
it accessible but in a way that it is not directly suitable for subsequent use.

On the other hand, the user, who is a potential generator of information himself has not facilitated the task of
the system operator. His increasing urge to publish, motivated or unmotivated, of good or bad quality, an addition
to, or a duplication of, already existing knowledge is giving the system operator 3 very hard time.